


hold your breath and count to ten

by daisysusan



Category: Revenge (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, Identity Issues, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 18:46:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daisysusan/pseuds/daisysusan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>put your hand in my hand and we'll stand</i> // Nolan was a liability and Aiden was not, but, of course, everything was infinitely more complicated than that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hold your breath and count to ten

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lauran41](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lauran41/gifts).



> Many thanks to R for reading this over and helping out where I got the canon all messed in my head. ♥ Title (and beginning of the summary) from Adele's _Skyfall_.

Emily didn't slam the door as she came inside, but she thought about it. Control was the name of the game, never letting a façade slip or revealing more than you meant to, always being perfectly poised regardless of what was thrown at you. And slamming a door wasn’t part of that. Every little bit of control counted, because there was always someone lurking in the shadows waiting to take advantage of even the slightest display of weakness.

She knew that, because usually the person lurking there was her. So she didn’t slam the door, she didn’t so much as obliquely hint at anything to do with her father. 

When she focused in on her surroundings rather than schooling her face into something that didn’t reflect her emotions, she noticed that Nolan was on the sofa. Because Nolan was always on the sofa these days.

Nolan was a complication and an asset—he knew too much to ever be cut loose, and his resources were not something to be thrown away lightly regardless, but Emily wasn’t here to make friends, or even allies. He was smart, motivated, willing—eager—to help, and those weren’t things she could afford to do without; his assistance had proven invaluable. 

But one wrong move and she was finished. In jail. Strung up on charges that, unlike those against her father, would be entirely true.

Only Nolan didn’t act like he was there out of loyalty or some understanding that she didn’t trust him to keep her secret if she cut him out, he acted like a friend. 

He made her dinner and then fell asleep on the couch in his bathrobe, feet tucked awkwardly under the throw pillow while the smell of spices drifted in from the kitchen. Tonight, his mouth was hanging open just the slightest bit and one of his arms was off the edge of the sofa, his hand resting on the floor. Emily’s stomach twisted with something uncomfortably akin to fondness. 

“Nolan,” she said, maybe harsher than she really intended. But maybe not, maybe harshness would get him to leave sooner—except it wasn’t exactly unpleasant to come back to someone else having cooked dinner or to have company for watching TV, and the other day, when she’d dozed off on his shoulder, Nolan had just let her sleep. She’d woken to him rubbing her back gently, fingers trailing through the ends of her hair as they did. It had been intimate, and she needed that to stop. 

He hummed, screwing his face up before he opened his eyes. 

“There’s dinner in the kitchen,” he said. And then, a little wry—but not entirely without seriousness, “We can watch TV while we eat and then I’ll give you a foot rub. It’ll all be very domestic.”

Emily laughed, because that was the easiest thing to do. It didn’t entail thinking about whether or not she wanted anything like that from Nolan.

\--

Aiden was unexpected; Aiden was always unexpected, except that he wasn’t. He was steady in a way that no one else was with her. He’d known her as Amanda, and understood her, but he seemed to understand Emily just as well. He was strong and reliable and he understood the forces that had shaped her, the twists in her life that turned her from a girl to a pariah to a woman with a different name. 

And if he didn’t seem to grasp how all the pieces fit together and made her tick quite the way Nolan did, well, that was okay. He could defend himself, could fight for his own life. 

He wasn’t a liability. Involving him, getting his help, it never meant risking his life. Well, not in the same way she’d risked Nolan’s so many times over. 

Emily forced herself to not let the images of Nolan beaten bloody, tied up, tortured, play through her brain like a horror movie she’d left in her wake. 

Swallowing back the vicious reminder that Nolan wasn’t cut out for the physical side of her mission, she reminded herself that he had asked to help. Every time, he’d sought her out, asked what he could do, offered his money, his time, his mind, his resources. Nolan was nothing if not a willing participant. He’d known the risks, and he’d chosen to get involved anyway. 

Well, perhaps not with Tyler, but no one had known the risks with Tyler. 

Regardless, Aiden had seen her so much worse than Nolan—sort of. Aiden had seen her reckless and without the calm purpose she’d had when she’d found Nolan. Nolan had seen her worse, of course, but she’d been Amanda then. Amanda the broken teenager with the dyed hair and the shattered family and no one no but herself to rely on. 

He didn’t call her Amanda, though—he called her Emily, separated her from her past. Emily was composed and respectable and wealthy—and ruthless. A lot of people called her Emily because they didn't know any better. And a few people called her Amanda because that's how they’d known her first. Nolan had looked at her and decided, after weighing both sides, that she was Emily; he’d known her first as Amanda and had evidently decided it didn’t suit her anymore.

For something so creepy, it was oddly comforting.

Emily didn’t think Amanda’s name suited her much anymore either; it had a new owner, a new Amanda Clarke to face the world and shoulder the burden of being David Clarke’s daughter, which was no easy load to bear. This way it was split—Emily carried the private pain of losing her father to a frame job and the responsibility of avenging him, while Amanda was the public face of the operation, a daughter who hadn’t inherited any of her traitorous father’s tendencies. 

Aiden didn’t wait for her the way Nolan had. He came and went often without warning, appearing behind her, waiting in the shadows of her bedroom—all the things she had done to Nolan. They were so pointedly alike in so many ways, she and Aiden. He shared her all-encompassing drive for revenge, the need to right past wrongs that boiled hot somewhere under her cool calculation. And—Nolan didn’t. And yet she found herself more willing to trust in Nolan’s actions, which came, if not from affection for her, then his relationship with her father. His help felt different—more genuine, perhaps—than did Aiden’s, not that she could parse out why. 

Not that such things should matter. In the end, all that mattered was winning. Beating the Graysons. Making them pay for what they did. Nolan, Aiden, Daniel, Jack, none of them were even half as important as that. 

Of course, she couldn’t do it without them either. 

And therein lay the problem. 

She wasn’t even sure she wanted to go it alone anymore, wasn’t sure she knew how to hold herself together without someone to fall back on. It had been easier with Daniel—easier to pretend, easier to keep her distance. Daniel had been a means to an end. 

Nolan had been one as well, at first, but he’d stuck to her like a burr, stubbornly friendly and helpful and accepting. And now she wanted him with her for the long haul, standing next to her when she successfully ruined the Graysons. Aiden didn’t feature in that mental image, not really. Or perhaps not yet? Once up on a time, Nolan hadn’t been there either. 

Emily tried to keep from thinking about it too much. Emotional ties weren’t the reason she was doing this.

\--

Nolan wasn't on the sofa anymore. She'd told him not to be, told him to find his own place to live, but it was still strange. Aiden was, sometimes. Aiden would wait for her on the sofa occasionally, but more often he'd lurk in dark corners.

He called her Amanda.

That felt significant somehow, especially when she contrasted it when Nolan’s carefully weighed choice to call her Emily. 

She wasn’t sure about Aiden, not really. For all the reasons she’d already listed out to herself, his reasons for staying with her and his knowledge and other things she didn’t want to take the time to examine. 

Not sure wasn’t good enough, not when there was so much resting on her every move. Every time she trusted someone, she took the chance that they would ruin everything she was working for, and Nolan never had. Aiden hadn’t either—nor had Amanda, for that matter—but it felt more significant with Nolan. 

So many things felt more significant with Nolan than they did with anyone else. Than she’d expected they would ever feel. Sometimes he would say things—do things—imply things with a twitch of his lips or a jerk of his head—and the thoughts he caused would linger. Thoughts she wasn’t going to let herself ponder, about morals and justification and collateral damage. 

Nolan might be collateral damage. 

She didn’t want that to be her sticking point, the thing she couldn’t get past in order to reach her goals. This was why everyone needed to be expendable, forgettable, mistrusted and unknown. Nothing to tie her to a place or a person. Nothing but her own drive and the memories of a heartbroken and confused child. 

Guilt was for people who had something to lose.

But then, maybe she did have something to lose now. Nolan had said he was scared of her once, and it had stung more than she’d expected it to. The words cut, just a little. They shouldn’t have; Emily was in the business of making people afraid of her, or at least of the idea of her. Maybe not her by name, but the haunting shadow of vengeance, she wanted them to be afraid of that. 

It wasn’t the same when it was someone she trusted—reluctantly, but Nolan had proven himself more than enough times over—looked her in the eye and intimated that she was frightening. Not the mysterious person raining damage down on everyone who helped ruin David Clarke, but rather it was Emily Thorne—the Emily Thorne she built from just a name—who was scary to him. 

\--

Nolan waited for her outside now, leaning against the porch railing or slumping asleep in a chair like the stereotype of a nerd he used to be. He still had a key, because for all her protestations of needing to function in isolation, Emily’d never quite had the heart to take it away from him, and it was strangely comforting to know that he could get in whenever he wanted. 

She wasn’t sure when Nolan’s constant presence had stopped being annoying and had, in fact, veered all the way into being comforting, but she had a sneaking suspicion it was well before he started napping on her couch and cooking her dinner without bothering to put on pants. 

Regardless, Emily shook him awake, holding back a quiet laugh at his shocked and baffled expression when he realized he was asleep outside. Nolan and outside never seemed to have gotten along particularly well; Emily hadn’t gotten the impression he voluntarily spent a lot of time there. 

After a moment, he straightened up and edged over to make room for her on the bench seat. Emily settled down next to him, her back a little too straight to be really comfortable but then—she was never sure how to hold herself around Nolan. She couldn’t let herself fold into his arm where it was resting casually across the back of the bench—actually casual, not calculated false-casual like a teenager in a movie—but she wanted to, and she was unnerved by the desire. 

Taking comfort in Aiden was easier than this, and Emily didn’t know why. Nolan didn’t say anything, just moved his arm slowly until his fingers were resting against her shoulder, the tips of them cool through her thin shirt. 

“Are you okay, Ems?” he asked, low and close. 

Emily shrugged. Lying to Nolan was difficult, but the truth wasn’t easy either. 

When had lying to Nolan become difficult? Lying was easy, lying was the only thing she’d done for as long as she could remember. Lying to Nolan ought to be just like lying to anyone else, but he’d made it different, and now he was sitting next to her and touching her cautiously. 

Because she scared him. She scared Nolan, and that might not be something she was okay with. She didn’t mind scaring Aiden; she minded the idea of scaring Daniel only because it would have ruined her plans.

But Nolan. 

Things came back to _but Nolan_ so often these days. 

“We’re friends, right?” Nolan said, his voice pitched even lower than before. Intimate, almost, except for the uncertainty in it. 

“We are,” Emily said, letting her head tip onto his shoulder. 

“Good,” Nolan said. 

Sitting there, leaning into Nolan just the tiniest bit, Emily felt more relaxed than she could remember in a long time. His fingers moved just the slightest bit against her arm, drawing abstract shapes with chilly trails. 

“How long have you been outside?” Emily asked. “Your hands are cold.”

Nolan shrugged, making a face. “I’m not sure. What time is it?” He didn’t give her time to answer the question, reaching for his cell phone even as he spoke. After glancing at the screen, his face turned down even more. “A couple of hours? I don’t remember exactly when I got here.”

“Come inside,” Emily said, surprised by her own insistence. “We’ll make dinner and watch something terrible on TV.”

Not waiting for him to follow—confident he would—she stood up and walked into the house.

“Next time, just let yourself in,” she called back to him.


End file.
